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Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.

Graham Greene

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Graham Greene
Age: 86 †
Born: 1904
Born: October 2
Died: 1991
Died: April 3
Autobiographer
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Berkhamsted
Hertfordshire
Henry Graham Greene
Pity
Sociology
Destroys
Cruel

More quotes by Graham Greene

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All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.
Graham Greene
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One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can not remember what toothpaste they use what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge minor ones may be photographed.
Graham Greene
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Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.
Graham Greene
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A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.
Graham Greene
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I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever.
Graham Greene
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I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?
Graham Greene
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So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.
Graham Greene
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The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?
Graham Greene
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I couldn't help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but I've forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing.
Graham Greene
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They are always saying God loves us. If thats love Id rather have a bit of kindness.
Graham Greene
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Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncans death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?
Graham Greene
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We forget very easily what gives us pain.
Graham Greene
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All the emotions have something in common. People are quite aware of the sorrow there always is in lust, but they are not so aware of the lust there is in sorrow.
Graham Greene
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Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.
Graham Greene
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The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.
Graham Greene
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I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.' Rose didn't answer the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil.
Graham Greene
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Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.
Graham Greene
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She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.
Graham Greene
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He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.
Graham Greene
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Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long.
Graham Greene